The New York Public Library's archive is so massive that some of the material has never been seen except on request.
Beginning Friday, the library presents a selection of those hidden gems, a group of works showcasing the extraordinary printmaking skills of American impressionist artist Mary Cassatt.
“Daring Methods: The Prints of Mary Cassatt” includes 88 prints donated to the library in 1900 by Samuel Putnam Avery, a Manhattan art dealer who developed a close working relationship with the artist.
It is the first time that the 30 color prints and 58 monochromes, created between 1878 and 1898, are being shown as a group at the New York Public Library.
Born to a wealthy Pittsburgh family, Cassatt was the lone woman and only American among the French impressionists in the late 1800s. Her paintings are celebrated for her tender depictions of mothers and children in domestic settings. She died in 1926, the last 11 years nearly in darkness as her eyesight failed.
Her prints are less sentimental and more incisive than her paintings, said Anne Higonnet, professor of art history at Barnard College and Columbia University and author on different aspects of impressionism.
Her print imagery still deals with childhood and motherhood but she also tackles subject matter not found in her paintings: women performing their daily routines and toilettes. She even did some nudes, albeit in a discreet and modest manner, said Madeleine Viljoen, curator of the library's print collection, which contains 200,000 original works of art on paper beginning with the 15th century.
Cassatt's talents as a printmaker are well-documented, but what makes this exhibition so compelling is the focus on the artist's printmaking methods, beginning with her first tentative black-and-white attempts in 1878 and ending with her fully realized and dazzling color prints.
The show demonstrates how invested Cassatt was in the printmaking aesthetic, again and again reworking her copper printing plates, experimenting with different methods and making numerous iterations of the same composition with only slight changes to achieve the effect she desired.
“One of the things I wanted to show in this exhibition was not only her great successes but also some of her failures as a printmaker,” said Viljoen.
“Some of her early prints are disastrous,” she said. “It's kind of wonderful as a result, because you can really see her using this medium and not always finding what she wants, dropping it and then trying again.”
In the “Letter,” a drypoint-and-aquatint color print, Cassatt used a desk from her own Paris apartment to create the image of a woman seated at her writing desk sealing an envelope. The subject is Western but the decorative background wallpaper is inspired by patterns in Japanese woodblock prints.
The exhibition runs through June 23.
Ula Ilnytzky is a staff writer for the Associated Press.
